America's antagonistic China policy doomed to boomerang

BEIJING, April 25 (Xinhua) -- "People who are aiming to retard China's progress, slow it down or even reverse it are making a mistake. That is not going to happen. And (the) decoupling we are going through hurts both sides, not just China," retired U.S. career diplomat Chas Freeman has said.

In the context of current American China policy, what Freeman told Xinhua in February looked perfectly reasonable.

Envious of China's peaceful progress over the past decades, some U.S. politicians are becoming restless, thinking that the U.S. global hegemony is under threat. They hype up the "China threat" theory and make containment of China their top priority.

However, their China policy, being antagonistic and anti-intellectual, will only accelerate the decline of Washington's hegemony and ultimately harm U.S. own interests.

INSTIGATING "NEW COLD WAR"

For years, Washington has been playing the "Taiwan card" to contain China, creating tension in the South China Sea, and peddling lies about China's human rights conditions in Xinjiang and Tibet. It has left America's domestic problems unsolved while creating turmoil around the world.

"Small yard, high fence," "decoupling," "delinking," "democracy and authoritarianism" ... words with Cold War overtones now appear frequently in U.S. policy papers and think tank reports on China.

Diego Pautasso, a Brazilian scholar of international politics, told Xinhua that "the United States represses China in various fields, such as politics, economics and technology."

"Washington's willingness to re-enact a new Cold War seems very clear to me, both from an ideological point of view and from a military and technological point of view," he said.

"America is too scared of the multipolar world," Stephen Walt, a Harvard University professor of international relations, wrote in an article published by Foreign Policy in March.

He said U.S. leaders prefer the expansive opportunities and gratifying status that come with being an indispensable power, and they have been reluctant to abandon a position of unchallenged primacy.

It turns out that there is no way Washington can tell right from wrong. Despite the fact that a recent China-brokered rapprochement deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran has set a widely acclaimed example for other countries to settle disputes through dialogue and negotiation, CIA Director William Burns reportedly aired Washington's frustration over Riyadh's rapprochement with Tehran during his unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia.

"America's unipolar status has corrupted the country's foreign policy elite. Our foreign policy is all too often an exercise in making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort made to understand the other side's views or actually negotiate," CNN anchor and political commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Post.

"Our foreign policy is run by an insular elite that operates by mouthing rhetoric to please domestic constituencies -- and seems unable to sense that the world out there is changing, and fast," said Zakaria.

"CHINA POLICY NOT WORKING"

For years, U.S. politicians have been hyping up the so-called "China threat," attempting to divert public dissatisfaction on domestic affairs. For them, it would be extremely difficult to actually address social issues such as wealth gaps and racial discrimination, so they turn to a "blame China" game instead.

"Congress does not have a lot of incentive to do the 'right thing' unless it is likely to boost their poll standing or bring in more campaign funds," Greg Cusack, a former member of the Iowa House of Representatives, told Xinhua. For U.S. politicians who crave political gains, blaming China and accusing opponents of "caving to China" is a convenient choice.

The "spy balloon" rhetoric, as well as the "China virus" conspiracy, stemmed partly from such political calculations.

"Apparently we are politically paralyzed in the United States and prevented from taking any initiative" to create conditions for talks with China and manage the bilateral relationship, Freeman told Xinhua.

"In the run-up to an election, there is a lot of demagoguery and populist rhetoric. And this makes it very difficult to take the sort of initiative that I think is necessary" for managing the relationship, he said.

Instead of crafting a rational China policy, the U.S. government has -- in the name of protecting national security and safeguarding so-called democratic values -- imposed trade restrictions and a technology blockade on China.

Such measures, which some observers believe are aimed at stifling China's growth, have failed to achieve its policy goals.

Although the United States has been levying additional tariffs on Chinese products since 2018, the bilateral trade volume in 2022 hit nearly 760 billion U.S. dollars, reaching a new high and defying talks of decoupling.

Despite the United States cracking down on Chinese companies in the high-tech sector, a report released in November 2022 showed that China had secured a top spot in terms of global patent filings in 2021, highlighting its strong impetus in innovation.

"Washington risks pushing against economic gravity," former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in an opinion piece on Foreign Affairs earlier this year, noting that efforts to shut out China on advanced technologies will also hurt the United States.

"American businesses are put at a huge competitive disadvantage, the U.S. consumers pay the price," said Paulson in the article titled "America's China Policy is not working."

A paper from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) published in December said that growing U.S. hostility to trade in recent years risks reversing decades of hugely successful policy, and a more protectionist United States would undermine the global economy.

SLOWING DOWN CHINA, OR U.S. ITSELF?

Washington's China policy, designed to slacken the pace of China's growth, is nothing but a mirage. In fact, the more the United States toughens its stance on China, the stronger the backlash it gets.

A report released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's China Center in partnership with Rhodium Group showed that if 25-percent tariffs were expanded to cover all two-way trade, the United States would forgo 190 billion dollars in GDP annually by 2025.

If decoupling leads to the sale of half of the U.S. foreign direct investment stock in China, U.S. investors will lose 25 billion dollars per year in capital gains, and models point to one-time GDP losses of up to 500 billion dollars, showed the report titled "Understanding U.S.-China Decoupling: Macro Trends and Industry Impacts."

In an article titled "America's Zero-Sum Economics Doesn't Add Up" published recently by Foreign Policy, Adam Posen, president of the PIIE, said Washington's policy approach is based on such profound analytic fallacies that self-sufficiency is attainable, that more subsidies are better, and that local production is what matters.

Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at U.S. Cornell University, warned about the costs to Americans of many of the policies ostensibly designed to protect the United States.

"My big concern is that efforts that we are taking to slow Beijing down are slowing ourselves down in the process," she said.

Meanwhile, more countries are seeing Washington's hegemonistic pursuits through its overbearing China policy, and have refused to comply.

"There are virtually no U.S. allies that are really all-in on the idea of a cold war with China," Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer was quoted as saying by Politico. "The politics around the China relationship -- which is incredibly toxic and hostile in the United States -- that's generally not true (for) really any ally."

French President Emmanuel Macron has stressed on different occasions that Europeans should not be followers of the United States in crises that Europe has nothing to do with, and "must be able to choose our partners and shape our own destiny."

Similarly, European Council President Charles Michel said "there is indeed a great attachment that remains present ... But if this alliance with the United States would suppose that we blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States on all issues, no."

In the meantime, many developing countries are expecting a fairer and more equitable international order, instead of being forced to take sides or becoming pawns for the United States to contain China.

For example, earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and Iran, two arch-rivals in the Middle East, agreed to resume diplomatic relations under China's mediation. Saudi Arabia has also remained in contact with Russia concerning oil prices.

Washington's strategy of "attempting to organize a coalition of like-minded countries to counterbalance and pressure China" is not working, said Paulson.

"It hurts the United States as well as China, and over the long term, is likely to hurt Americans more than Chinese people," said Paulson.